Iron Empire As far back as 1832, Macgregor Laird had taken the iron ship Alburkah to Africa and up the Niger, making it among the first ship of such construction to take the open sea. But the use of iron hulls in British inland navigation can be traced decades earlier, beginning with river barges in… Continue reading Steamships, Part 2: The Further Adventures of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
For much of this story, our attention has focused on events within the isle of Great Britain, and with good reason: primed by the virtuous cycle of coal, iron, and steam, the depth and breadth of Britain’s exploitation of steam power far exceeded that found anywhere else, for roughly 150 years after the groaning, hissing… Continue reading Steamships, Part I: Crossing the Atlantic
As we noted last time, twenty years elapsed from the time when Trevithick gave up on the steam locomotive before rails would begin to seriously challenge canals as major transport arteries for Britain, not mere peripheral capillaries. To complete that revolution required improvements in locomotives, better rails, and a new way of thinking about the… Continue reading The Rail Revolution
Railways long predate the steam locomotive. Trackways with grooves to keep a wheeled cart on a fixed path date back to antiquity (such as the Diolkos, which could carry a naval vessel across the Isthmus of Corinth on a wheeled truck). The earliest evidence for carts running atop wooden rails, though, comes from the mining… Continue reading High Pressure, Part 2: The First Steam Railway
The next act of the steamboat lay in the west, on the waters of the Mississippi basin. The settler population of this vast region—Mark Twain wrote that “the area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey”—was already growing rapidly… Continue reading High-Pressure, Part I: The Western Steamboat
Robert Livingston’s First Partnership It would take a further twenty years after the deaths of Fitch and Rumsey before steamboat travel was established on a permanent basis in the U.S. Several more would-be steamboat inventors came and went before a partnership between two men drove the development of the steamboat to its successful conclusion. The… Continue reading The Steamboat Inventors: The Second Generation
Program Note: When last I posted, I said I was working on transforming The Backbone into a book. That work is still ongoing, but it's taking longer than I expected to hammer the blog posts into a coherent manuscript. After so many months, I felt I needed to resume the story of the Age of… Continue reading The Steamboat Inventors: The First Generation
[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] Up until the 1780s, steam engines were used almost exclusively for pumping water. To the extent that they drove industrial machinery, it was almost always indirectly, by lifting water uphill from whence it could run back down and turn a waterwheel. Industry thus remained dispersed in villages… Continue reading The Steam Revolution
[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] A New Synthesis In the eighteenth century, new lines of communication and new alliances were forming between the world of the artisan and craftsman on the one hand, and the world of the “schoolmen,” the university scholars, steeped in abstract knowledge, on the other. This convergence arguably… Continue reading James Watt, Instrument Maker
[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] The steam engine might have amounted to relatively little if not for its two compatriots, coal and iron. Together they formed a kind of triumvirate, ruling over an industrial empire. Or perhaps an ecological metaphor is more appropriate – a symbiosis among three species, each nourishing one… Continue reading The Triumvirate: Coal, Iron, and Steam
[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] In the early years of the eighteenth century, Thomas Newcomen devised the first practical engine for pumping water out of a mine. His engine condensed steam to generate power from the weight of the air, relying on the new scientific knowledge developed by Torricelli, Pascal, von Guericke,… Continue reading The Pumping Engine
[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] The miners of Renaissance Europe, digging ever deeper into the earth in the search of ore, invariably found another, less welcome substance – water. Everywhere they dug, it found them, seeping into tunnels and shafts. If it could not be removed at least as quickly as it… Continue reading The Weight of the Air
[Part of a series: The Age of Steam] The most striking feature of the engineering quad of my alma mater, Rice University, are the three massive slabs of granite erected on large plinths at its center, each canted at a different angle: 45, 90, and 180 degrees. Less remarked upon, but more significant to my… Continue reading The Age of Steam: Introduction
Creatures of Thought 